March 8, 2024: Bad Hombres
Biden chides Israel; TikTok bill passes committee; Palestine activists destroy art
The Big Story
President Biden delivered his State of the Union address last night, and it was, if not exactly good, at least fairly lucid. Comparing himself to FDR and Lincoln (and, implicitly, his opponents to Hitler and the Confederacy), Biden railed against the Supreme Court, Big Pharma, price-gouging corporations, Trump, and Republicans while warning that “not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today.” We suppose one could call that “fiery”:
We have more to say on other parts of the speech below, but for now we’d like to focus on one moment that’s gone semi-viral. In an unscripted response to heckling from Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Biden referred to the February murder of University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley by an “illegal.” That language didn’t play well with congressional Democrats—Joaquin Castro (D-TX) called it “dangerous”—or with the graduate-educated revolutionary section of the Democratic base:
At a minimum, however, it suggested a dawning awareness on the part of the Biden brain trust that the border is going to be a big problem in November, as this recent poll from Pew shows:
Indeed, this morning, the New York Post put out a timeline tracking the odyssey of the “illegal” suspect in Riley’s murder, Venezuelan gang member Jose Antonio Ibarra, on his journey through the United States. It’s a remarkable document in and of itself, but it also serves as a helpful illustration of how border enforcement works under the current administration—i.e., it doesn’t.
Sept. 8, 2022: Ibarra is arrested by Border Patrol in El Paso and released within 24 hours due to “lack of detention capacity.”
May 22, 2023: Ibarra files for asylum and a work permit, but neither are granted. He is already working in New York City, illegally, as a DoorDash and Uber Eats delivery driver.
Aug. 31, 2023: Ibarra is arrested in New York City and charged with endangering a child for riding a gas-powered moped with his girlfriend’s son, who is not wearing a seat belt or a helmet. Rather than turn him over to ICE, the NYPD releases him and later seals his case.
November 2023: Ibarra flees New York with his girlfriend and moves to Athens, Georgia, another sanctuary city, to meet with his brother, Diego. Diego had been deported while trying to enter the country in April; several weeks later, he was arrested while re-entering and got into a fight with Border Patrol officers but was released into the country with an ankle monitor, which he promptly cut off. Social media posts from around this time show Diego posing with guns.
December 2023: Diego is arrested for driving under the influence and without a license. Diego and Jose are arrested for stealing from Walmart and subsequently fail to report to police, who issue arrest warrants. Diego briefly works for the University of Georgia using a fake green card.
Feb. 23, 2024: One day after Riley is reported missing for failing to return from a jog on campus, Athens police arrest Jose and charge him with malice murder, among several other felonies. The same day, the police arrest Diego for presenting them with his fake green card.
Bad hombres, as a certain real estate developer would put it.
But the immigration issue isn’t just about crime. Biden touted the strong economy in his speech, and on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released another stellar jobs report. It showed that the economy added 275,000 jobs in February, far more than the median estimate of 200,000—even as it quietly revised January’s also-stellar jobs numbers downward 35%, from 353,000 to 229,000.
There’s been a lot of talk over the past year from pundits friendly to the administration about why Americans aren’t more excited about our supposedly healthy economy. There are a lot of answers to that, including that prices are up nearly 20% since before the COVID-19 pandemic, that food prices are up even more, and that we don’t know how good the economy is, given the consistent divergence between the BLS establishment survey, which shows a great economy, and the BLS household survey, which shows a poor one. But additionally, as we’ve mentioned before, the overall increase in jobs obscures the fact that employment is booming for the foreign born while remaining flat or negative job for native-born citizens:
The Ibarra brothers, who managed to work several jobs without proper authorization amid their interstate crime spree, serve as a helpful case in point.
IN THE BACK PAGES: The Metropolitan Opera is obsessed with race. So why, David Goldman asks, has it turned the one opera in its repertoire that is explicitly about race into a ham-handed therapy session about daddy issues?
The Rest
→Biden also confirmed that he doesn’t read Tablet when he said that “more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed” in Gaza, “most of whom are not Hamas.” But as UPenn’s Wharton School Professor of Statistics and Data Science Abraham Wyner explained in Tablet (and The Back Pages) yesterday, those numbers, which rely on uncorroborated figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, are almost certainly fake, and we have no way of knowing the true casualty count. Biden was also captured on a hot mike telling Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado that he had told Benjamin Netanyahu—who is, we feel compelled to note, Jewish—that “you and I are going to have a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting.”
→The House Committee on Energy and Commerce voted 50-0 on Thursday to advance a bill, covered in yesterday’s Big Story, that would force TikTok to sever its ties with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) has said that he will bring the bill to a vote on the House floor next week. According to The Wall Street Journal, TikTok’s last-minute pressure campaign, which resulted in thousands of users inundating the offices of committee members with phone calls (some of them containing death threats and suicide threats), helped consolidate the unanimous vote. Former President Donald Trump, however, appeared to come out against the bill, writing in a post on Truth Social that “if you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business.” He went on to call Facebook “a true Enemy of the People.”
→A House appropriations bill passed on Wednesday—part of Congress’ rush to avoid a government shutdown next week—strips $3.5 billion from the $39 billion allocated for domestic semiconductor manufacturing grants in the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act and awards it to tech company Intel for a “secure enclave” that would produce microchips exclusively for the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, Austin Ahlman reports for The American Prospect. Intel, which designs chips but has only recently moved to expand U.S.-based production of them, is already set to receive $10 billion of the initial $39 billion, and Ahlman’s congressional sources suggest that the siphoning off of another $3.5 billion would undermine the act’s stated goals of diversifying the supply chain for microchips and onshoring microchip production.
To make matters stranger, the justification for the “secure enclave” appears to be a non-public U.S. intelligence report from 2021 describing “an unknown risk,” which apparently has not been disclosed even to members of Congress, “requiring heightened security at the [chip] fabrication stage.” That conclusion, moreover, was directly contradicted by a 2023 Air Force report, which said that fabrication was the most secure part of the chip manufacturing process, that the economics of the chip market make it so that the Pentagon “cannot maintain dedicated facilities,” and that it was in the Pentagon’s “interest to have access to multiple sources of microelectronics components for resiliency and cost competitiveness”—exactly the goal that the handout to Intel is likely to undermine.
Read it here: https://prospect.org/economy/2024-03-08-intels-3-5-billion-boondoggle-chips-act/
→An IDF investigation into the deaths of Palestinians during an aid delivery last week confirmed Israel’s initial claims that the majority of deaths and injuries occurred during a stampede of the aid convoy and that the IDF did not fire into the crowds surrounding the aid trucks, but only at a small number of individuals who disregarded IDF warning shots and advanced toward IDF troop positions nearby. The report, which included a precise timeline of events, also put the size of the crowd that rushed the convoy at 12,000. Axios reported earlier this week that the convoy disaster was a “turning point” for the Biden administration, which saw it “as an event that embodied all the Israeli policy failures in Gaza.”
→At least five civilians were killed in Gaza on Friday after being struck by humanitarian aid air-dropped by the United States, according to The Jerusalem Post, which said that the parachutes on the aid packages did not open. In our opinion, this tragic event embodies all the American policy failures in Gaza, and we hope the administration will see it as a turning point.
→Radical Islamists are famous iconoclasts, and so, too, apparently, are their Western supporters:
The video shows an activist from the group Palestine Action destroying a 1914 portrait of Arthur James Balfour hanging in Trinity College, Cambridge. Balfour, a British statesman and prime minister from 1902 to 1905, is most famous today for authoring the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which announced British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” We couldn’t find much on Palestine Action, other than that it’s a “direct action” group that has collaborated with Extinction Rebellion (shoot us a tip if you have any leads), but we did see several social media users point out that the activist appears to be wearing a Mulberry/Cara Delevingne quilted convertible bag, used versions of which sell for more than $800 on eBay.
→The Indian Wells tennis tournament is ongoing throughout this week and next, and that’s as good an excuse as any to share the work of our favorite tennis writer, Hugh Clarke. Clarke’s Substack, “A Thread of Order,” contains the best match commentary we’ve found on the internet, but our favorite is his “Death of a Forehand” series, which provides invaluable technical advice for any amateur players out there and also helps answer questions for casual fans, such as: Why were Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic able to dominate much younger, faster, and stronger players well into their thirties?
Read the first part here:
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The Met’s New ‘Therapeutic’ Forza Is a Disaster
A modern re-imagining turns tragedy to farce
By David P. Goldman
In the woke environment of the arts in New York City, where everything is and must always be about race, the Metropolitan Opera has somehow taken the one opera in the standard repertoire that is explicitly about race and transformed it into a ham-handed Freudian tale about a girl with daddy issues. The Feb. 26 premiere of a misguided update of Giuseppe Verdi’s The Force of Destiny, reimagined by the Polish filmmaker Mariusz Trelínsky, was one of the Metropolitan Opera’s less glorious moments. Freudian images are layered on with a trowel, past the point of absurdity, without a nod to the dramatic material, its historical context, and Verdi's somber, moving score, which is given an incongruously perky reading by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Despite its contrived Romantic plotting, La Forza del Destino remains one of theater’s most convincing love stories, because it is much more than a love story: It is a portrait of a doomed society that destroys its children. The terrible love that consumes Leonora and Alvaro—love that is as strong as death and harsh as the grave—doesn't occur randomly on dating apps. It surges when lovers see in the other the solution to intolerable life circumstances—in Leonora's case, the stench of decaying nobility, and in Alvaro's, the stigma of racial mixture. Leonora wants out, and Alvaro wants in, and each represents salvation and redemption to the other—and that is why their love is so fierce, and so doomed. Historical context is everything in this opera.
Verdi’s source was the wildly popular 1835 drama by the Marquis of Rivas, the preeminent Spanish liberal politician of his generation and briefly his country’s prime minister. Its title, La Fuerza del Sino, should be rendered, The Force of Fate, rather than Destiny. This distinction is characteristically Jewish. The standard Spanish language sources treat sino and destino as synonyms, but the leading Orthodox website for Spanish-speaking Jews, Mesilot ha-Torá, offers a translation of an essay by Rabbi Avi Weiss on the critical distinction between sino and destino. While fate casts each of us into a dimension of life we cannot control, destiny, writes Weiss, following Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, “is an active existence in which humanity confronts the environment into which she or he was cast … Humanity’s mission in this world is to turn fate into destiny, an existence that is passive and influenced to an existence that is active and influential.”
Greek tragedy knows only fate, because, as Heraclitus said, a man’s mores are his guiding spirit (usually translated as “character is destiny”). The lovers’ desperate passion for each other stems from their hope of rising above a decaying society that nonetheless will destroy them. The best modern tragedy, from Fernando de Rojas' crypto-Jewish drama La Celestina through Shakespeare and Schiller, tells us that it could have been otherwise, and the fault lies not in the stars but in us.
Baritone Igor Golavatenko as the avenging Don Carlo delivered a persuasive, note-perfect rendering of his role.The Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen sang the lead role of Leonora, and has a gorgeous instrument, at least in the middle and high registers, but inconsistent control of it. At her best she is "electrifying," as the Met declares in its advertising, but that is partly due to the uncertainty as to whether she will nail a high note with precision or lose it in a wobble. She is a brilliant and convincing singing actress, and a commanding stage presence, but not a vocalist of the stature of Leontyne Price, Martina Arroyo, Deborah Voigt, and other great Leonoras of the Met's past. Verdi demands a soprano with a powerful low register, where Davidsen is barely audible. As her paramour Alvaro, tenor Brian Jagde improved steadily through the evening and gave a moving conclusion to the opera. Mezzo Judit Kutasi wobbled her way painfully through the role of Preziosilla.
Although it follows the conventional division into musical numbers, La Forza del Destino nonetheless integrates its musical elements more successfully than any Italian opera that preceded it. Verdi repurposes some of his strongest musical elements for dramatic effect. Compare (at 23:10) Leonora’s defiant declaration of love for the mixed-race Alvaro—“I will follow you to the ends of the earth!”—to her resignation to a life of solitude and penitence (at 1:05). This is not a Wagnerian leitmotif, in which a snatch of music retains its connotation whenever it is repeated, but quite the opposite, a transformation of the music’s dramatic implications that reflects the inner changes of the character.
Several complete versions of Forza are available on YouTube, including a 1958 television broadcast with English subtitles from Naples’ Teatro San Carlo with a young Renata Tebaldi and Franco Corelli. My favorite is a 1957 audio recording with the great tenor Giuseppi di Stefano and the incomparable Leyla Gencer as Leonora, whom I heard in this role at the Verona Arena in 1967.
Forza ranks No. 11 in performances among Verdi’s operas during the past five seasons (2019-23) according to operabase.com, but its overture is the most frequently performed by far as a standalone concert piece, and with good reason. Opera overtures typically are a pastiche of tunes from the opera; Forza’s overture, composed for the 1869 La Scala production, is an integrated musical whole. The listener has the impression that Verdi reproduced the tragedy in his orchestral score, so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
***
Spain’s national tragedy, and the personal tragedy of the opera’s doomed lovers, was the limpieza de sangre—purification of blood—Spain’s obsession 500 years before the Nazis. Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the same year that it founded the New World empire that would corrupt it irredeemably. Spain’s aristocrats lived off the mines of the New World, enslaving large parts of the indigenous population. Fernand Braudel calculated that all of the bullion Spain extracted from the New World and then some went via Genoa and Venice to China to buy silks and spices, in an orgy of nouveau riche display that lasted the better part of two centuries before the money ran out.
Peru had won its independence from Spain in 1826, only nine years before Rivas’ play appeared; Spain did not recognize its independence until 1869. The Jews were a distant memory by then, but the issue of Spanish vs. native ancestry and the collapse of the Spanish Empire were both vivid in the public mind. Spain clung to the remnants of its possessions in the Philippines and the Caribbean until 1898.
Rivas’ play is set around 1700, at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession, the beginning of Spain’s long agony of internal strife and foreign intervention that culminated in the Civil War of 1936-39. The fortunes of the Calatrava family are in decline. The first character we encounter in Rivas’ drama is the gypsy Preciosilla, who offers that the vanity of the Sevillian nobility is of one piece with their poverty. She also tells of dashing “Don Alvaro the Indian,” the best bullfighter in Spain, whose courtship of the aristocratic Leonora is the talk of Seville.
Don Alvaro is the son of Peruvian colonials who instigated a revolt against Spanish rule, and has Inca blood. His nemesis Don Carlo calls him a "mulatto" with "unworthy blood." He loves Leonora de Vargas, a daughter of the Calatrava dynasty, but the family rejects him on racial grounds. A botched elopement leads to the accidental death of Leonara's father, and her brother Carlo determines to kill the lovers. “Fate cannot separate us!” the lovers sing, and it doesn’t; the three are reunited through a series of coincidences improbable as only the Romantic stage of the 19th century could devise. These are less noisome than modern critics opine; after all, coincidence is everywhere the engine of Romantic drama (“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”).
The lovers are separated; Leonora seeks refuge from her murderous brother and succor for her soul as a hermitess, while Alvaro, who believes her to be dead, joins the army. War has metastasized through the rotten fabric of the Spanish Empire. Verdi inserts a scene from Schiller’s great drama Wallenstein’s Camp, depicting the soldier-folk and their camp followers at the beginning of the Wallenstein trilogy. Wallenstein, the great imperial generalissimo of the Thirty Years War, is obsessed by fate and consults an astrologer. Schiller shows us that “fate” lies in the actions of ordinary people who are swept out of normal existence into a war that becomes a self-feeding monster. By quoting Schiller, Verdi tells his audience—who knew Wallenstein as well as we know Casablanca—that he embraces Schiller’s critique of fate.
Trelínsky cut half of the scene adopted from Schiller, and changed it from a roaring portrait of the soldateska into a USO entertainment for wounded soldiers. The Met’s program notes sniff, “There is also a Dickensian tendency to digress into slice-of-life vignettes that are only tangentially related to the main thrust of the drama and that even incorporate some buffo comedy.”
Nothing could be more clueless: As Verdi’s audience well understood, the raucous mercenaries and their traders and whores showed the disintegration of the social fabric. Real tragedy is found in the disrupted lives of ordinary people; that is what makes Rivas’ drama and Verdi’s opera so compelling, and what makes Trelínsky's re-imagining so silly.
Alvaro ultimately takes vows at the same monastery where—unknown to him—Leonora is hidden, but Carlo tracks him down. Inflamed by Carlo’s racial insults, Alvaro kills his persecutor, but not before Carlo kills Leonora. In Rivas’ play (and the first version of Verdi’s opera), Alvaro declares, “Hell, open your mouth and swallow me! Let the sky fall. Let the human race perish. Extermination! Destruction!” Verdi then eliminated Alvaro’s suicide in a later version, and the opera now ends instead on a religious note. That is a weakness; Rivas’ nihilistic conclusion is more persuasive and more Spanish. The enlightened Duke of Rivas saw the gates of hell opening for his country, and Alvaro’s terrible declaration was a warning lest we succumb to fate rather than choose our destiny.
The director Trelínsky explains his alternate therapeutic version of Forza as follows: “Like most fathers in Verdi operas, he is domineering and even brutal in the way he exercises his authority. This permanently marks his children, who are unable to escape the roles he has given. Then, the trauma caused by his violent death is like a break in billiards. It propels all the characters along a fixed trajectory from which there is no release—not because it’s ordained by God but because it’s the way people are, because of our psychological makeup.”
If only Leonora could have found a good therapist to help her work through her daddy problem! Father Guardiano, who protects the fugitive Leonora at his monastery, appears at the opera's conclusion in the general's uniform of Leonora's father, a generic military dictator surrounded by lackeys giving Hitler salutes—just in case the audience didn't get the hint that the two "fathers" are connected. Alvaro, Spain’s best bullfighter in Rivas’ drama, first appears incongruously as a schlump in a sweatshirt, leaving Leonora’s love for him wholly unmotivated.
Updating operas with modern costumes and customs is a tricky proposition that always entails pitfalls. But the new Forza is an irredeemable disaster.
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